were incredibly tiny. The projects closer to the city, which had been built in the Stalin period, had decent-size apartments and were much coveted. My hotel, the Astoria, built in the late nineteenth century and recently renovated, was as empty as the airport. Normally, American tourists fill the city's hotels and restaurants, but fear that anti-American feeling had been aroused by our recent mindless bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade had kept them away. (I, in fact, encountered no anti-American feeling during my stay in Russia.) My handsome room was furnished with imperial-style antiques and looked out on the dull-gold dome of St. Isaac's cathedral, which was designed by an Italian architect and has a beautiful Florentine austerity. During the Soviet period, the cathedral housed a Museum of Atheism, but now it had resumed Russian Orthodox services, as churches throughout the former Soviet Union were doing. Nelly told me that under Communism belief was tolerated among those willing to remain in society's lowliest positions; but to rise in the hierarchy it was necessary to be an atheist. Atheism was the 'official religion,' she said. On the way to the hotel, she had pointed out a church in which the Soviets had dug a swimming pool-now being filled in.
The next morning, when Nelly asked me to propose a substitute for the visit to Catherine's palace, I had one ready, and a few minutes later Sergei pulled up in front of a small house on a narrow side street where Dostoevsky had once lived, and which was now the Dostoevsky Museum. We bought tickets and walked through a series of small rooms filled with conventional Victorian furniture and objects. If one stretched one's imagination, one could read into the slight dreariness and somberness of the rooms some connection to the author of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. But they could just as well have been occupied by a government clerk or a retired army officer.
Chekhov never met Dostoevsky, who died in 1881, at the age of sixty, and was not drawn to his writing; as he exalted Tolstoy, he edged away from Dostoevsky. In March 1889, he wrote to Suvorin, 'I bought Dostoevsky at your store, and am now reading him. Pretty good but too long-winded and too indelicate. There is much that is pretentious.' And one day in 1902, while out fishing on an estate in the Urals, Chekhov said to a friend, 'We're such a bone-lazy people. We've even infected nature with our laziness. Look at this stream-it's too lazy to move. See how it twists and turns, all because of laziness. All our famous 'psychology,' all that Dostoevsky stuff, is part of it, too. We're too lazy to work, so we invent things.' (The friend was Alexander Tikhonov, a twenty-two-year-old student of mining engineering, who later became the Soviet writer Alexander Serebrev. His book Time and People, in which the passage appears, has not been translated into English. I quote from an extract in David Magarshack's biography.) Satiric references to 'that Dostoevsky stuff' recur in Chekhov's stories. In his not all that funny sendup of detective fiction 'The Swedish Match' (unlike any other story by Chekhov, it seems too long), an eager young sleuth, trying to pin a murder on the victim's elderly sister, tells the examining magistrate, 'Ah, you don't know these old maids, these Old Believers! You should read Dostoevsky!' Or in 'Neighbors' (1892), a pathetic loser named Vlassich is trapped in a 'strange marriage in the style of Dostoevsky'-to a prostitute, naturally. But Chekhov's relationship to Dostoevsky is not quite as simple as it may appear. Literary influence is a complicated business, and does not hinge on like or dislike. It is not always conscious. There is reason to think that Chekhov, though he disliked Dostoevsky, drew on him nevertheless. 'Neighbors' is one of the works in which this influence-unconscious or merely covert, who can say?-may be glimpsed.
The story is narrated by a young man named Pyotr Mihailich, whose sister, Zina, has been seduced by the pathetic Vlassich. Vlassich is separated but not divorced from the Dostoevskian tart, and Zina has defiantly moved in with him on his run-down farm. Pyotr rides out to the farm intending to horsewhip his sister's seducer-and stays to eat strawberries with the errant pair. He finds he cannot hate Vlassich. Indeed, he 'was fond of Vlassich; he was conscious of a sort of power in him.' At the end of the story, as Pyotr Mihailich rides home, he berates himself. 'I am an old woman! I went to solve the question and I have only made it more complicated-there it is!' Making it more complicated is, of course, Chekhov's own stock in trade; but when, near the end of 'Neighbors,' the story takes a jokingly strange turn, we may wonder whether he realized just how complicated he was making it. (We do know that Chekhov himself was critical of the story; he wrote to Su-vorin that he thought it shouldn't have been published.) The strange turn comes when Zina, making nervous, black-humorous conversation with her brother, says of her new home, 'It's a charming house… There's some pleasant memory in every room. In my room, only fancy, Grig-ory's grandfather shot himself… And in this dining-room, somebody was flogged to death.' Vlassich then tells the gruesome story of a sadistic Frenchman called Olivier, who had leased the house and had 'sat here at this table drinking claret' while stable boys beat to death a young divinity student Olivier disliked. Pyotr Mihailich, angry at himself for his inaction, thinks, 'Olivier behaved inhumanly, but one way or another he did settle the question, while I have settled nothing and have only made it worse… He said and did what he thought right, while I say and do what I don't think right; and I don't know really what I do think…' Chekhov knew very well what he thought of violence-he hated it-and Pyotr Mihailich's perverse approval of Olivier's violence seems more in 'the style of Dostoevsky' than in that of Chekhov. A Raskolnikov or a Stavrogin might have rationalized such brutality, but surely not soft, nebbish Pyotr Mihailich. The lapse may help us untangle the knot of Chekhov's relationship to Dostoevsky. That Chekhov was concerned with the question of evil that reverberates through Dostoevsky's novels is clear from works like 'Ward No. 6,' 'In the Ravine,' and 'Peasant Wives.' He may have found Dostoevsky pretentious, but he might not have been impelled to write these stories had not The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment come into his ken. As Chekhov divided his life between the time he was beaten and the time he was no longer beaten, so his stories break down into those that take place in the universe where 'everything is permitted' and those set in the world of ordinary human beings who cannot stop making each other miserable but do not step over the line into barbarism. He had begun to look into the abyss early in his writing career; among the contributions to the humor magazines there are grim little tales that point directly to the mature works of despair. One of these is the seven-page story 'Because of Little Apples' (1880), in which another sadist watches another beating. This time, a landowner catches a young engaged peasant couple eating apples in his orchard, and devises the amusing punishment of forcing first the girl to beat the boy and then the boy to beat the girl. When it's the boy's turn, his sadistic impulses are set off, and in his 'ecstasy' he cannot stop beating the girl. Chekhov will reuse this Dostoevskian psychological insight in 'Peasant Wives.' Here the evil hypocrite Matvey watches the husband of the woman he has seduced go out of control and beat and kick the woman he loves until she collapses. The beating in 'Because of Little Apples' stops (when the landowner's daughter appears on the scene) before the girl is seriously injured but not before the relationship between the pair is irreparably damaged. The boy and the girl walk out of the orchard in opposite directions and never see each other again. The scent of Dostoevsky that subtly emanates from the story was picked up by Robert Louis Jackson. In an essay called 'Dostoevsky in Chekhov's Garden of Eden' Jackson plausibly connects the story's 'motifs of physical cruelty and spiritual disfiguration, the absolute humiliation of the individual, and sadistic delight in cruelty' to Dostoevsky's work in general, and, in particular, to a chilling story about the destruction of innocence called 'A Christmas Party and a Wedding.' He believes that the nineteen-year-old author of 'Little Apples' was already thoroughly conversant with Dostoevsky's work (which would mean that he was rereading it when he made his comment to Suvorin) and that the parallels between 'A Christmas Party' and 'Little Apples' are too obvious to ignore.
Chekhov never again wrote so directly about the catastrophe that occurred in the biblical first garden. His gardens thenceforth are prelapsarian, sites of redemption and renewal, freedom and air. References to the Serpent's gift of sexual guilt are relegated to out-of-the-way corners of the narrative, and lodged in brief, unemphatic references to the eating of fruit. Zinaida, the sexy heroine of 'An Anonymous Story,' who diverts the hero from a revolutionary mission, is introduced lying on a sofa eating a pear, for example; the temptress antiheroine of 'Ariadne' eats apples and oranges in the middle of the night (as well as roast beef, ham, and men); and, in the most famous example, Gurov eats watermelon-a display not only of his callousness but an allusion to the transgressive sex that has just taken place. The lovers in 'An Anonymous Story' and 'Ariadne' end up as alienated as the peasant couple in 'Little Apples.' It is worth recalling about Anna and Gurov that after they have sex it is touch and go whether they, too, will go off in opposite directions. When Anna assumes her Mary Magdalene attitude, and reproaches herself for being 'a vulgar, contemptible woman,' Gurov feels 'bored, already, listening to her' and 'irritated by the naive tone, by this remorse, so unexpected and inopportune.' But, as roues know how to do, he controls his irritation, and sweet-talks Anna out of her uninteresting remorse. Most significant, he gets her out of the room. It is the trip to Oreanda-to the sea, mountains, open sky-that marks the beginning of the peaceful love that is to arise between them, and of his transformation. Dostoevsky's heavy shadow doesn't fall on this story, of course-the most delicate and fragrant of Chekhov's tales-or on the largest part of his work. And, where it does fall, it is so oblique that we need the help of a literary radiologist like Jackson to make it out. When we left the Dostoevsky Museum, Nelly directed Sergei to drive us to the nearby Anna Akhmatova Museum, located in a wing-
